It’s hard to say who was really responsible for finally landing Truman as a contributor, Andy or me. The closer I had come to Truman, the more determined Andy became to make Truman his best friend instead of mine. After Andy’s Athletes opened in London in July 1978, Fred and I decided to stay in Europe for Minnie de Beauvau-Craon’s wedding to Duncan McLaren, a British art dealer, at the family château near Nancy. The European press was billing it as “the wedding of the year” and Minnie had agreed to give Interview the exclusive for America. Andy was also invited, of course, but he had reached his limit for a trip, two weeks, and was so mad at me for staying on—the first time I had done that since Mexico in 1972—that he refused to pay for my hotel room.
On my first day back at the Factory, Brigid told me, “Andy has really horned in on your affair with Truman while you were away.” I reminded her that it wasn’t an affair, and then called Truman to tell him I was back. “I’m having the best time with Andy,” he said. “He just tape recorded one of the deepest moments in my psychoanalysis.”
Andy—and Sony—followed Truman everywhere that summer and fall, from his psychiatrist to his masseur, from his barber to his dentist. “Oh, the greatest thing happened on First Avenue today,” Andy told me after one of their dates. “This guy stopped in front of Truman and me and said, ‘Two living legends! Wow!’ Isn’t that the greatest?” But there were also times when Andy arrived at the Factory with a disappointed look on his face. “Truman was boring,” he invariably said. “He was trying not to drink.”
I too was trying not to drink. After Andy’s Torsos opening in Los Angeles, in September 1978, I went to see Dr. Corcos, who had treated my anemia back in 1972, about those pains in my side, and he told me I had “toxic hepatitis,” a self-induced condition that would lead to cirrhosis of the liver if I didn’t stop drinking and taking cocaine immediately. “You’re thirty-one,” he told me, “but your liver’s sixty-one. You’ve really got to take care of yourself for at least a year.” When I told Andy, he said Dr. Corcos didn’t know what he was talking about and that I should go to see Dr. Robert Giller, Halston’s physician. I did run into Dr. Giller not long afterward at one of Halston’s late-night bashes, and he told me he could cure me in a month with a megadose of vitamins. As he headed to 54 with the rest of the crowd, and I headed home, something told me to stick with my own doctor.
It was a struggle. Andy seemed to be waiting for me to slip, and when I did ten weeks after my diagnosis, he was finally satisfied. It meant he could spend the next day taunting me. “How come you got in so late today, Bob?” he wanted to know. I told him I had been up all night at Xenon and Crisco Disco. “How could you do that, Bob? What’s your doctor going to say?”
That Halloween, I put on my black suit and a black witch’s hat and headed for 54, determined to stay sober, just to prove to myself—and to Andy—that I could do it. Fortunately, one of the first people I ran into was Truman, who was proudly waving a bottle of Perrier. “I was talking to Liza and Steve,” he told me, “and one was drunker than the other. They were both leaning on me.” He took me by the hand, and all the while telling me not to drink, led me through the darkened tunnels and past the high piles of pumpkins that surrounded the dance floor. We stopped to chat with Lorna Luft, who was dressed as a lion tamer, and Dr. Lazare, D.D.S., who was dressed as an M.D., and his wife Arlene, dressed as a witch. We got caught up in a drag Miss Universe Contest, about two dozen men with broad shoulders and hairy chests posing as bathing-beauty contestants from outcast countries: Miss Uganda, Miss South Africa, Miss Paraguay, Miss Bulgaria. “There’s that awful Gloria Vanderbilt,” said Truman, “with that awful Sidney Lumet. I guess they’re both so desperate they’re getting back together. Heh-heh-heh.” They were with Michael Jackson, who was then starring in Lumet’s Ozoid remake, The Wiz, which got Truman cackling at the idea of starting a ménage-à-trois rumor. At two-thirty, thousands of black balloons cascaded from the rafters. Truman and I were still there, still sober, though for some reason I was sure he was on speed.
After that night, Truman started inviting me to swim with him in the pool at the UN Plaza Hotel. Whenever I arrived, Truman would say, “What took you so long? I’ve already done two hundred laps.” Then, while I attempted ten, he’d dog paddle around me, chattering on about that day’s Liz Smith and Suzy columns, spitting out chlorinated lines like “I just don’t understand how that bright Aileen Mehle can go on writing about that dreadful Nedda Logan,” which echoed around the pool, much to the delight of the other swimmers.
After one of these swims, Truman asked me if I could get somebody to roll one hundred joints as a present “for Jack Dunphy” on his birthday. “He’s out in Southampton,” Truman explained, “and he loves to smoke, but he doesn’t know how to roll the stuff.” I asked a young friend to do it, whom Truman rewarded with a one-joint tip and a pair of ancient formal slippers, which he said were made especially for him by Lobb’s on the occasion of his famous Black and White Ball. The young friend wondered why the faded stamp inside them said “Brooks Brothers.” I wondered why Truman immediately started smoking the joints himself. Less than a week later, he was on the phone asking for a hundred more. At least he wasn’t drinking, and at least I wasn’t drinking with him.
The only time I saw Truman drink that fall was when Andy was with us. It was as if he felt he had to perform for Andy’s tape recorder, to tell outrageous stories to keep Andy from being bored, to self-destruct in front of Andy’s needy eyes like so many lesser lights before him. A couple of weeks before that Halloween party, Truman had invited Andy and me to a Sunday brunch at his apartment. He’d said he wanted us to get to know his new friend, Bob MacBride, better, and it would just be the four of us. MacBride, a married man with six children, was a physicist and engineer who wanted to be a sculptor. Truman had a history of falling in love with married men, though in this case it was questionable whether the infatuation was reciprocal. Andy was immediately convinced that was why Truman was “being so friendly to us. He wants us to help Bob MacBride.” Perhaps he was partially right, though Andy always saw ulterior motives in everyone—perhaps because those were the only kind he knew himself.
Bob MacBride greeted us at Truman’s door and said that Truman didn’t want to be disturbed. He was in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on the meal he had been cooking for days. But Truman appeared soon enough, waving his little hot-pink palms like a dancing doll, kissing and hugging us and raving about the fantastic meal he was about to serve us. I followed him back into the kitchen, which was suspiciously spotless, to help with the drinks. He poured vodka into orange juice for Andy and himself, and tried to persuade me to have a drink too. I told him I had already smoked a joint at home, and as it turned out, thank God I had, because it certainly helped make Truman’s home cooking—cold black bean soup with globs of sour cream; cold, slightly fried chicken, still pink; beefsteak tomatoes slathered with Truman’s secret-recipe ultra-creamy salad dressing—go down. Andy and Truman were on their second or third screwdrivers, and Bob MacBride and I were involved in a deep conversation about the relationship between modern sculpture and nuclear physics, or something like that.
Truman kept interrupting, perhaps fortunately, to tell us how much he hated Halston, Liza, Steve, D.D. Ryan, Regine, Regine’s, the Flamingo nightclub, sex with young boys, and YSL’s perfume Opium. It was the liquor talking, and Sony listening, pushed ever closer by her husband. Then came the pièce de résistance, a homemade apple pie. “I baked it all by my little ol’ self,” said Truman. “Then why does it have that silver cardboard from a bakery under it?” Andy asked me when Truman went to the kitchen for another round of screwdrivers and Bob went to the living room for the plywood model of his proposed sculpture for a public square; it was based on esoteric mathematical formulas way beyond my grasp. “Wouldn’t it make the best beach-house?” said Truman of Bob’s creation.
Brunch had started at two in the afternoon, and by five Andy and I were itching to leave. He murmured something about having to walk the dogs, but Truman was having none of it. It was time to go to dinner, he said, at his favorite Italian restaurant, which was just right around the corner, Antolotti’s. “I’m not even going to change,” he said. He was wearing custom-made denim overalls with a pink shirt, and topped off his outfit with a denim cap. Bob MacBride was wearing baggy store-bought jeans and an old flannel shirt. He put on a red nylon windbreaker that was hanging by the door, and Truman said, very sweetly and sincerely, “You really look good in that, Bob. I think I’m going to give you that.” Bob MacBride beamed. “That was really nice,” I said to Andy as we walked to Antolotti’s. “Listen, Bob,” he said, “when you have a wife and six kids and some famous star gives you a plastic jacket, it’s like getting a diamond.”
Andy made one more attempt to run home to Archie and Amos at Antolotti’s door, but Truman just pushed him in. Truman ordered up more screwdrivers, an extra-large antipasto for four, and what he said was the best dish in the house, linguini with lobster sauce, then launched into my-night-at-the-Flamingo-with-Halston-Liza-Steve-and-D.D. for the fifth or sixth time. I noticed that Andy had let his tape run out, and then he managed an escape, leaving me to deal with a stuporific Truman and Bob MacBride’s engineering equations.
“Andy’s really a sweet boy,” Truman said. “He cares about those dogs so much. I really have to find Andy a lover. I’ve always been a very good friend to Andy, you know. Well, I mean, after all, we were natural-born friends. But I always, oh, I don’t know … kind of watched out for Andy. Andy used to go out with my mother. I mean, my mother was very elegant, and she did live on Park Avenue. She committed suicide. But Andy used to come over in the morning and take my mother out. Of course, she was just so happy to have someone to drink with in the morning, she didn’t care who it was. Heh-heh-heh. But then one morning my mother said something really nasty to Andy. I never really found out just exactly what it was. But I got a pretty good idea, and then, I don’t know, Andy told me about it seven or eight years later.” (Andy had told me that Truman’s mother told him to leave her son alone, and called him a faggot.) Truman went on, rambling and gushing drunkenly, “I just love Andy and I love you and Fred’s so nice … ”
If Andy suspected Truman of using us to get Bob MacBride into the art world, a suspicion that seemed more likely when Truman started suggesting the four of us have dinner with Ivan Karp and Henry Geldzahler, I suspected him of using us to get himself back into Society. The Answered Prayers scandal of 1976 had died down, mainly because Truman hadn’t published any new chapters in the following two years. Many people said he hadn’t written any new chapters in the following two years. Diana Vreeland told us that even Truman’s agent, Swifty Lazar, didn’t think Truman would ever finish Answered Prayers. “Success hasn’t agreed with Truman,” she said.
Andy, of course, repeated Diana’s comment to Truman and told Diana what Truman had said about the book she was working on with Chris Hemphill: “Diana’s book is going to be really bad, because she wouldn’t recognize the truth if it walked up to her and slapped her in the face.”
In November 1978, the Libermans gave a cocktail party for São Schlumberger. I was among the first to arrive, and Tatiana Liberman took me aside and asked if I was on good terms with Truman. She said she had invited him, but was afraid that it was a mistake, and asked me to help her take care of him. Truman and Bob MacBride arrived soon after this exchange, Truman in a brown-and-maroon plaid suit, a pink shirt, a maroon bowtie, maroon socks, and custom-made brown pumps with gold buckles. I tried to lead him into a far corner of the library, but he wanted to stand right at the top of the stairs so he could see everyone arrive.
Philanthropists Mary Lasker and Deeda Blair were the first to come up the stairs. They said hello to Truman. Then came man-about-town Bert Whitley, who didn’t say hello to Truman. Joe and Estée Lauder did. Nan Kempner dashed right by into the living room, waving surreptitiously at me. Then Jerry Zipkin arrived, and followed Nan into the living room without so much as a nod. Truman said he thought it was time to circulate. I headed toward the library, but he wanted to follow Jerry into the living room. When Jerry saw Truman coming, he maneuvered his way toward the library, with Nan right behind him. Truman now wanted to go to the library, too, and I followed, just in time to see Jerry and Nan heading back into the living room. Finally, Billy Rayner approached Truman and me, and we had to stand still for a moment. “There’s that dreadful Nan Kempner,” Truman said provocatively. “Don’t talk about my best friend that way,” said Billy. “Better be careful,” said Truman, “or I’ll talk about you that way.” I was beginning to be sorry that I had ever told our hostess that I’d take care of Truman.
A few weeks later, Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera gave “a little lunch,” as they put it, for eighty at Doubles. It was a buffet, and when it came time to form tables, Countess Consuelo Crespi came to me and said in a low, nervous voice, “Do you speak to Truman?” I told her that I not only spoke to Truman, I swam with him. “Thank goodness,” she said with a sigh of relief, “because Reinaldo asked me to put together a table of people who speak to Truman.” She had chosen a table on the Vladivostok end of the room, and there sat Truman with Andy, Kenny Jay Lane, Denise Hale from San Francisco, and Elizinha Gonçalves from Rio de Janeiro. It seemed that the farther away from New York socialites lived, the less likely they were to be angry at Truman.
All was going well until Truman decided he was tired of Siberia, and wanted to tour the Continent. “I think I’ll go circulate,” he said. Consuelo, who has a nervous tic, Denise, who has a nervous stutter, and Andy, who was just plain nervous, started twitching, spluttering, and shaking. “You better go with him, Bob,” said Andy. Only Kenny Lane kept his cool, as usual, saying, “Now this is going to be fun.” We all watched as Truman stopped at every single table and said hello to every single person. When he came to Peter Glenville, who had been one of the anti-Capote captains in the Battle of La Côte Basque, we all held our breath. They seemed to be … talking! “Oh, Truman is really back in Society now,” said Andy. Consuelo, Denise, and Elizinha nodded in agreement, delighted that they had accepted him at their table first. Only Jerry Zipkin kept his back turned when Truman approached. But then everybody said that Truman’s next chapter was all about Jerry, though nobody will ever know for sure, because Jerry’s prayers were answered: There never was a next chapter.
There was a next book, however, called Music for Chameleons, and ten of the fourteen short pieces in it were originally published in Interview in 1979. It all started one day in November 1978. Between swimming with Truman, smoking pot with Truman, dining with Truman, and dancing with Truman, it suddenly occurred to me that we should put Truman on the cover. Andy loved the idea: He already had entire days of Truman on tape. When I called Truman to say we wanted him on our January cover, he said he would only do it if Andy did the cover portrait himself. I explained that if Andy did Truman, he’d have to do every cover after that and we had to keep Andy’s portrait business separate from the magazine’s covers. “Well, if I’m not good enough for Andy,” said Truman, “then his magazine isn’t good enough for me.”
I went to Andy with Truman’s reply, and we came up with a counter offer: Andy would paint Truman’s portrait, not for the cover, but as a personal gift, in exchange for Truman’s contributing a piece to Interview every month for one year. “He really wouldn’t have to do anything,” Andy said. “Tell him that I’ll just tape him with any person he wants every month and then Brigid will type it up and he can make something out of it. Tell him it’s a new way to write without writing. I’m sure he’ll go for it.” Truman went for it. Then Andy started worrying that the first person Truman would want to tape would be Bob MacBride. “You did say any famous person, didn’t you, Bob?”
But Truman had been quite precise when we came to terms, and he wasn’t about to let Andy change them, or me forget them. “Now remember,” he had told me, “you said I can do anyone I want. And my pieces have to be the first feature in the magazine, right after the table of contents. And there can be no advertising, photography, or illustrations on my pages, unless I decide otherwise. The title ‘Conversations with’ will be in lower case and handwritten in black: ‘Capote’ will be capitalized and set in red type. Got that: red, not pink or orange. I can see it now. It’ll look really elegant. And the most important thing is that nobody, and I mean nobody, including Andy, can change so much as a comma, without my permission.”
Yes, Truman. Yes, Truman. Yes, yes, yes, Truman. I said that a lot during the following year, but it was worth it. “Conversations with Capote” made people take Interview much more seriously, especially people who wouldn’t deign to look at it before, like the heads of major advertising agencies, and the local literati. Even Jerry Zipkin said Truman’s pieces were the best things we had ever published, and sent out more gift subscriptions, though he still avoided Truman when their paths crossed.
Truman’s cover story ran that January, with a photograph of him in a hot pink fedora by our regular cover photographer then, Barry McKinley, and it sent up sales in what was traditionally a very slow month. Andy and I taped Truman by the pool, over lunch at La Petite Marmite, up at Kron’s chocolate shop on Madison Avenue, and then over dinner at New York’s first nouvelle cuisine restaurant, Raphael on West 54th Street, where we were joined by Ivan Karp, owner of the O.K. Harris gallery, his wife Marilynn—and Bob MacBride, “computer expert and sculptor.”
“Conversations with Capote” debuted that February. Andy had taped Truman at the apartment of Robert Livingston, a gay activist who was dying of cancer, and at the office of Dr. Norman Orentreich, the highly publicized dermatologist. The latter was more Andy’s idea than Truman’s—Andy was still going to him for skin treatments and antibiotic pills after all these years. Truman acquiesced, saying he liked “the juxtaposition of life and death—or vice versa.” But it was the first and last time he based a piece on tapes made by Andy.
The problem was that Andy overtaped and threw the conversations off course, and then Brigid couldn’t deal with typing up that much tape, and Truman couldn’t deal with cutting down that much material. They both became quite hysterical over the fifty-page Orentreich manuscript, and finally Brigid exploded at Andy when he arrived at the Factory one afternoon. “You just think the more the better,” she told him. “And you say the stupidest things.” Andy was used to Brigid’s bluntness and hit back with a blunt line of his own, “You look fat today, Brigid.”
I backed Brigid up, telling Andy that Truman’s pieces shouldn’t be like the interviews we did ourselves, but something only he could do. Brigid persuaded Andy to buy a tape recorder for Truman, so he could work on his own. “Buy the cheapest one they have,” he told her. When she brought it up to Truman’s, Bob MacBride immediately noticed that it wasn’t a Sony, and also gave Brigid a hard time about the interview he wanted her to set up for him with Buckminster Fuller. Then Andy accused Brigid of being in cahoots with Truman and Bob MacBride all along. “So you made me buy that tape recorder for Bob MacBride, not Truman. Well, that’s just great. I don’t want him interviewing Buckminster Fuller. He’s too sixties for us!”
After that, it was never clear how much of Truman’s work was based on tapes and how much was based on his extraordinary recollection of dialogue. He never asked Brigid to transcribe another tape, and she never saw any tapes when she went up to his apartment to help him with his pieces. “He would already have everything written out on a yellow pad,” she told me later, “in that small, neat, slightly flowery handwriting of his. And he’d go on about how he ‘slaved over those goddamn tapes’ and transformed them into ‘little gems.’ Basically, I was his audience. He’d try things out on me. And sometimes, just to make him feel that I was intelligent, I’d suggest a slight change and he’d say I was right and change it. But mostly I sat there and listened to him read from his yellow pad, because I thought everything was brilliant just the way it was.”
Brigid worked with Truman in his guest bedroom, which he had turned into an office and wallpapered with several hundred copies of his Interview cover. “He loved that cover,” Brigid said, “with the pink hat and the yellow background. And it was funny to be sitting there with Truman with all these Truman heads everywhere. It was kind of like Andy’s Cow wallpaper.”
Like Truman and me, Brigid was trying not to drink. It brought the three of us closer, and Truman liked to joke about our “very exclusive A.A. cell,” though only Brigid was a member of that organization. Andy, on the other hand, was no more supportive of Brigid’s efforts than he was of mine, or Truman’s. He’d often come into the office and say, “It’s so cold out, I can feel it in my bones. Wouldn’t a nice hot Irish coffee be nice now, Brigid? You can have just one, can’t you?” Brigid would say she didn’t want an Irish coffee, but Andy would give her a hundred-dollar bill and send her out to buy Irish whiskey and heavy cream. She’d whip up the drink for him and he’d take two sips and leave the remainder on the desk in front of her. Then, when she binged out, he’d walk around the office saying, “I don’t understand why Brigid just can’t have one drink. What’s wrong with her?” In the warm weather, he’d come in and say how hot it was and suggest that Brigid whip up some piña coladas.
Of course, he was envious of Brigid’s relationship with Truman. After one of her working visits to Truman’s apartment, she made the mistake of telling Andy that Truman had read her “what he said was the rest of Answered Prayers. Stuff from old journals I think he’s going to put in.” Andy asked her if she had taped it. No. “You didn’t tape it?” he said. “I can’t believe it. What do you think you’re doing? You’re working for me, you know, not Truman. Do you realize what a great play that could be—Truman sitting there reading this great gossip. And you didn’t tape it. I don’t know what you’re thinking sometimes.” Brigid said that she thought it would be wrong to surreptitiously tape Truman working and then slip the tapes to Andy. “And then it would be part of your ‘work,’ right?” she told him. Andy gave her a filthy look, and walked away. She had hit the nail on the head.
Truman’s next piece was on Bobby Beausoleil, the convicted killer who was, Truman wrote, “the key to the mystery of the homicidal escapades of the so-called Manson family.” It was based on an interview he had done with Beausoleil a year earlier, when he and Peter Beard were working on a television documentary about San Quentin prison. Brigid was so impressed by it that she came straight to my apartment from Truman’s and read it to me aloud. It was short, but amazingly concentrated. The character just leapt off the page at you, and just when you were starting to like him, he said something really murderous. Truman was pleased with it, too. He told me that he had “a much better grip on the form now, and it’s going to get better and better and better.” He said he thought Andy’s interviews “meander around the personality without ever hitting it. But I’m going to show how, with just questions and answers, I can write a whole short story, or a perfect scene in a play.”
And that’s exactly what he did in the two best pieces he did for us, “A Day’s Work,” which we published in the June 1979 issue, and “A Beautiful Child,” in the July issue. In the first, he followed a black cleaning lady named Mary from apartment to apartment, telling her story and the stories of the people whose homes she cleaned, in two hilarious and poignant pages. In the second, he re-created an afternoon he spent with Marilyn Monroe in 1955, and again in two pages brought her alive, as the ultimate actress, the sum total of all the insecurity, charm, and pain endemic to the breed, in a way that all the long and mighty books written about her never had.
Truman was in great form working on those pieces that spring. In February, he had had a facelift, and since then he hadn’t been drinking at all, just smoking pot, lots of it. Still, he was slim and energetic, and his long-time friend C.Z. Guest told us that he hadn’t been in such good shape or sounded so happy in years. “I’m glad he’s getting back to his old self,” she said, “and it’s all because of the wonderful work he’s doing for your magazine, Andy.”
Andy, however, was getting worried about Truman’s involvement with Interview, especially when Truman started calling it “our magazine.” “Send him a little check every month,” Andy advised me. “That way he won’t really own anything. He likes getting checks. They’re the only things he looks for in the mail.” I explained that the copyright law didn’t really work that way, and suggested that Andy get started on Truman’s portrait, our agreed form of payment. “That’s a terrible idea,” said Andy. “If we give Truman his portrait now, he’ll never finish a year’s worth of work.”
I began to share Andy’s worries the day Truman called and said he wanted to have an “editorial meeting—first, just the two of us, and then with the rest of the staff.” I suggested setting it up the following week and then let it slip by, but Truman was soon on the phone again. We had to have dinner that night, he told me, “to discuss all the fabulous ideas I have for our magazine.” He ordered me to come up to his place directly from the office, and when I got there, handed me a cigar-sized joint of “Maui-wowee.” As I took off for the Aloha state, he quickly proposed a letters-to-the-editor page, changing my “OUT” column from a diary into “something more like Liz and Suzy,” and running ten pages in our next issue from Carl Van Vechten’s book of photographs from the thirties, forties, and fifties. “Or do you think it’s only worth eight?”
I wanted to say two, but took another puff instead and let him go on to his next idea: calling up “every major tastemaker in town” and asking his or her opinion of the latest movies, books, restaurants—“It’s a very clever way of reviewing things without really reviewing them. Don’t you love it?” Then he launched into his vision of our magazine, taking several more puffs himself along the way. “We’re going to make Interview the magazine of the eighties and nineties,” he said. “Just the way Vanity Fair was the magazine of the twenties and thirties, and The New Yorker was the magazine of the forties and fifties. There’s no magazine that people can’t wait to get; they just buy them like toilet paper now. But you just watch. When we get done with Interview, they’re going to be fighting for it at the newsstands, hitting each other to get it first. But we have to give it a really big push and Andy’s got to pull his weight. He’s just not doing enough now. He’s got to go on TV with me and push, push, push.” I pointed out that Andy never did TV and with good reason: When we went on to promote his movies, the box office receipts always went down. “Well, I’ll force him to go on,” Truman said. “And I’ll make him look good. I know how to do that. I’ll do all the talking. Listen, honey, I’m getting paid seventy thousand bucks to give six lectures at all the University of California campuses and they’re not paying me because I don’t know what to do. You just leave everything to me. Should we have one more joint before we go to dinner?”
I grabbed my coat, but Truman insisted I leave it there. “We’re just going across the street to Petite Marmite and you can get it when we come back here after dinner to look at the new ideas for layouts that I worked out.”
I finally exited at 1 A.M., after seven solid hours of talking about Interview without letup. “It’s like having two Andys now,” I thought. And Andy I hated all of Andy II’s ideas.
Fortunately, Truman soon left for California, and extended his tour to Utah and Illinois. Carole Rogers had two hundred copies of Interview shipped to each of his stops, and he signed them and gave them away at his appearances, just like Andy I. Unlike Andy I, he was also very effective at selling the magazine on the local talk shows, a fact he reminded me of after each and every appearance with a phone call to tell me “all the wonderful things I said about our magazine.” He also called me the minute he landed in Manhattan that May. “C’mon over,” he said. “I just got the best idea for our next cover! But I’m not going to tell you what it is until you get here.” Truman’s idea: Greta Garbo, painted by Andy, with fifteen of her closest friends talking about her inside. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll get them to talk.” Then he handed me a large envelope bursting with “the best sinsemilla from San Francisco,” and said, “Start rolling.”
In July, Andy and Truman did an Interview promotion in Southampton. Although it was a huge success, it was also the beginning of the end. Barbara and a couple of other staffers went out Friday night and passed out flyers at the local discos. On Saturday morning they hit the beaches. We also had a skywriting plane flying from Westhampton to Montauk and back that day, spelling out “Andy Warhol’s Interview” across the clear blue horizon—it cost remarkably little. Andy, Fred, and I limousined out with Andy’s latest crush, James Curley, the dashing young son of Nixon’s former ambassador to Ireland and Bush’s current ambassador to France. Curley brought along Lisa Rantz, a perky fashion stylist who also had a crush on him. Andy told me I should give her a job.
We arrived in Southampton early and decided to take a walk on the beach, hoping to see Barbara or the skywriting plane. Andy turned skin-poison purple within five minutes, so we went to the bookstore. Truman was already there, signing away. “Where were you?” he said to Andy. “I’ve already autographed at least a hundred magazines.” Truman’s date was Jan Cushing, née Golding, now Amory. “So I hear,” she said, “that Truman’s going to do a real number on Lee Radziwill in next month’s Interview.” Andy looked at me, and I looked at Fred, who said he was going to take another walk.
Truman had already done a real number on Lee a few weeks before on the Stanley Siegel show. He was furious at her for refusing to take his side in his lawsuit with Gore Vidal. Lee had serious problems of her own at the time, having just left San Francisco hotelier Newton Cope standing at the altar. Truman was unsympathetic. Lee had betrayed him, he said, and it was her fault that he was drinking again. Just a few days before our Southampton promotion, I was stunned to find him taking cocaine from a Princeton undergraduate in the back room at the Factory after a lunch for Gianni Versace. He had ranted and raved against Lee then too; there was no doubt that he was genuinely hurt. But this was the first any of us had heard about his upcoming attack on Lee in our magazine.
The line outside the Southampton bookstore grew longer and longer. Barbara was hawking her heart out, we had taken spots on the local radio and ads in the local papers, and as a further lure were serving Kirin beer and Godiva chocolates in the courtyard behind the shop. Truman was glowing, chatting up the fans and telling them to watch out for his next big piece, “It’s going to be a killer-diller.” Andy sat beside him, trying not to look too glum.
On Sunday, we took the Interview promotional tour to Fire Island Pines, with skywriting but without Truman, who said Fire Island was finished. It was actually at the height of its popularity, a nonstop orgy at the end of the Disco Decade. Rupert Smith, James Curley, and I picked up Andy in the limo. Jed was at the window, watching as we drove off. Andy said that Jed had asked him who Curley was the previous morning and he had said Rupert, and now he was worried because Jed had seen the real Rupert. “You really think people are dumb,” I told him, “don’t you, Andy?” He just laughed, and said, “Listen, Jed’s no angel.”
Marina Schiano had come with us too, and she and I attempted to hand out flyers on the beach, where most of the sunbathers were naked, on Quaaludes, and not in the mood to read, or move. The signing was at the Hardware boutique, adjacent to the Boatel, where the infamous afternoon “tea dance” was in full swing. Marina and I attempted to hand out flyers there too, but most of the dancers were in short-shorts and jockstraps, on poppers and coke, and not in the mood to read, or stop moving. “Who gives a shit about Andy Warhol” was a typical reaction. “I can see her any night at 54.”
Monday, July 10, 1979, was the first time we asked Truman to change so much as a comma. His August piece had arrived that morning. It was titled “Nocturnal Turnings: or How Siamese Twins Have Sex,” and it showed the effects of drinking on Truman’s work. It was essentially Truman interviewing Truman—the Siamese twins—about everyone he didn’t like, which is just what he did when he was drunk, make hate lists. This list read:
Billy Graham
Princess Margaret
Billy Graham
Princess Anne
The Reverend Ike
Ralph Nader
Supreme Court Justice Byron “Whizzer” White
Princess Lee
Werner Erhard
The Princess Royal
Billy Graham
Madame Gandhi
Masters and Johnson
Princess Lee
Billy Graham
CBSABCNBCNET
Sammy Davis, Jr.
Jerry Brown, Esq.
Billy Graham
Princess Lee
J. Edgar Hoover
Werner Erhard
He went on to write that everyone on his list was “full of horse manure” and Princess Lee most of all, because “she is a horse.… Don’t you remember Princess Lee; that filly that ran in the fifth at Belmont? We bet on her, and lost a bundle, practically our last dollar.”
While Andy, Fred, and Brigid stood by, I called Truman. I told him how brilliant his piece was and then started to say, “But, there’s just one little thing that makes Andy nervous. Couldn’t we just … ”
“No,” said Truman.
“Either you publish the piece exactly the way it is or don’t publish it at all.”
I said that we were afraid of being sued, and he said that he would sign a piece of paper taking full responsibility; he’d call his lawyer right away. Then he asked to speak to Andy, who stuttered his way through a string of ohs, uhs, and buts, finally telling Truman that Fred had seen Lee, but then he was afraid to go any further and passed the phone back to me. Truman wanted to know what Lee had said to Fred about him, and I said that Lee was too smart to put Fred in that position, hoping he’d take a hint. I told him that Lee was not in the best shape after the Newton Cope debacle, and her children weren’t exactly having an easy time of it either, and asked him to please, just this once, let us off the hook, just for me. He didn’t answer. I said that Interview wasn’t strong enough yet to get in trouble, and that Andy was so nervous about the whole thing he was thinking of canceling a trip to Europe.…
“Well, all right,” Truman said. “I’ll think it over.”
As soon as Truman hung up, Bob MacBride called from the studio he had taken in 33 Union Square West, asking me to have his Bastille Day sculpture photographed for Interview. I told him we’d love to run a piece on it, hoping he’d report that right back to Truman. Something worked, because fifteen minutes later Truman called back and said, “Well, I’ve thought it over, and I’m doing this just for you, and I’m doing it just this one time, and don’t ever ask me again. You can change Princess Lee to Princess X. And I hope Mr. Warhol calms his nerves.”
I called Rhinelander florist’s and asked them to send every orange lily—Truman’s favorite—they had in the place to the UN Plaza. A few minutes after that, Truman called back and we all stopped in our tracks again. “I’ve been thinking it over some more,” he said. “I don’t like Princess X. Let’s make it Princess Z. At least it rhymes. Heh-heh-heh.”
Soon Truman had a new idea: He wanted the Christmas 1979 cover. “But he was already on this year,” said Andy, against repetition for a change. He didn’t want his own picture, I explained, but a black wreath surrounding the title of the novella-length piece he was working on: “Hand-Carved Coffins.” Andy hated that idea. “A black wreath?” he said. “Oh, we can’t have that on our cover, Bob. You better tell him before it’s too late.”
I did tell him, but he kept pushing. Finally, I decided the only way he’d accept the rejection was if we came up with someone so big for that cover that even Truman would realize it was best for our magazine. My idea: Henry Kissinger, whose memoirs were published that fall. I contacted his publisher about it, and while we waited to hear back, I kept Truman at bay.
Andy did his part too, deciding that now was the time to do Truman’s portrait. We unveiled it at a birthday lunch for Truman at the Factory on September 28, 1979. It was one of Andy’s best portraits: emblematic and personal, flattering but haunting. Andy did two panels and in both Truman’s head and hand were floating on a white ground, as if he were lost in space, nowhere and everywhere at once. In one his fedora was bright yellow, in the other bright red, and in both his eyes were bright blue, as big and hard as marbles. Truman looked thin, smooth-skinned, and elegant, but he also looked shadowy, pulled, and plastic. I always thought that Andy’s most effective portraits were of stars, because he captured the reality of their unreality, and vice versa. They were people who had become their images, and that’s what so much of Andy’s work was about: images, idols, icons.
Truman loved his portraits, and he loved his birthday lunch. He worked on the guest list with Brigid and me: Winston and C.Z. Guest, Lynn Wyatt, Halston, Victor Hugo, Steve Rubell, D.D. Ryan, Diane von Furstenberg, Barbara Allen. Bob MacBride was there, of course, and Truman’s travel agents, Myron Clement and Joe Petrocik. Andy invited his new best friend, Famous Amos, the cookie maker, and I came up with a surprise for Truman: President Truman’s grandson, Clifton Daniels, Jr., whom I had met at Xenon a few nights before. Samantha Eggar had called that morning and said she had just arrived in town from L.A., so I asked her too. And Fred contributed two Kennedys—Kerry and Michael, the twin daughter and son of Ethel and Bobby. Then there was Mr. Ballato, who just happened to ring the bell with a panettone for Andy.
Brigid ordered a huge chocolate birthday cake, pounds and pounds of chocolate-covered strawberries and raspberries, and a singing telegram, working in the titles of all Truman’s Interview pieces and ending with “Forget peyote, get Capote!” Brigid was so proud of herself for not drinking and she managed to keep Truman sober too. “I love you all,” he kept saying. “I really, really do.” He was fighting to keep back the tears.
But he wasn’t about to drop the black wreath idea. He kept calling to find out if we’d heard from Kissinger yet. “He won’t sell twenty-five copies,” he said. He didn’t issue any ultimatums, but he did say that he thought we’d be making “a big mistake.” Meanwhile, Andy’s attitude was hardening against Truman. “Who does he think he is?” was becoming a regular refrain. “His things for us aren’t that good.” I told Fred I was getting nervous about losing Truman. His advice was “Don’t worry about it until there’s a crisis. We function best in a crisis around here.”
Kissinger turned us down at the last possible moment, thus joining the short list that included Richard Avedon, Candy Bergen, and later Meryl Streep. We decided to go with Andy’s first choice all along: Priscilla Presley. She had given us an insipid interview completely dominated by her then boyfriend, model Michael Edwards—she couldn’t answer the simplest question without looking at him first. She refused to discuss Elvis and only slipped once, when I jokingly suggested that she must have had lots of champagne and caviar in her Graceland days, and she blurted out, “No, never. Elvis hated fish!”
I would have fought for Truman’s cover if he hadn’t fixated on that depressing black wreath, or if I had liked “Hand-Carved Coffins” more. I thought it was too much like In Cold Blood, and that its ending was unbelievable. And Truman didn’t help his case any by telling us about the December cover that Esquire was doing for his short story “Dazzle”—a necklace with his title and byline in the middle of it. “It’s the same thing he wants us to do,” said Andy. “Except he’s giving them the color, and he wants us to take the black and white.”
Truman never said anything to me about our decision, though he complained about it to Brigid. Just before Thanksgiving, he called her in a panic, sure he was having a heart attack. She hurried to his apartment and discovered the truth: He had been drinking and taking coke and pills for four days straight. “Nobody loves me,” he kept moaning, “nobody loves me.”
Though he agreed to go on contributing to Interview for another year, it became impossible to pin him down on the delivery of the pieces he said he was doing. He promised us a chapter of Answered Prayers, but then disappeared for weeks, boozing and blacking out. Lester Persky bought the movie rights to “Hand-Carved Coffins” for $500,000 and Random House accepted Music for Chameleons against the million-dollar advance they had already paid him for the undelivered Answered Prayers. It seemed that when the financial pressure was off, Truman was even less inclined to put pen to paper. And the downhill slide hastened.
When Music for Chameleons was published in September 1980, Truman invited Andy, Brigid, and me to a celebratory lunch at La Petite Marmite. He was half an hour late and wearing a brown shirt over a blue shirt in lieu of a jacket. A floppy brown cap hid his recent hair transplants. He got things off to a bad start by ordering Andy to turn off his tape recorder. “What we’re going to discuss today,” he said, “is too important to be tape-recorded.” Then he launched into a fifteen-minute explanation of why Music for Chameleons wasn’t number one on the New York Times bestseller list, even though it was number one on the Time magazine list. “But it’s the first book of belles lettres to make it to number four on the New York Times list!” he said at least four times.
Then he railed against Diana Vreeland’s book, which had just been published; railed against Earl Blackwell and Eugenia Sheppard, who were waving at us from across the room; railed against Cecil Beaton, for putting down Answered Prayers in a letter to C.Z. Guest; railed against Dick Cavett for giving him a hard time about his husband chasing on Cavett’s TV show. “Why is it,” he said, “that you always think of the real good line when it’s too late? I mean, Dick Cavett was so rude to bring up that poor-wife bit, as if he just stepped out of the wheat fields of Kansas. But what I should have said to him was, ‘And when did you suck your first cock, Dick Cavett!’ ”
Andy said he liked Diana Vreeland, Earl Blackwell, Eugenia Sheppard, Cecil Beaton, and Dick Cavett, who everyone knew was straight.
“Isn’t there anybody you don’t like, Andy?” said Truman. “I mean, I’m going to start calling you Pollyanna Warhol. There must be somebody you hate.”
Andy turned an angry red and told Truman that a certain movie producer he liked so much was seen leaving a pickup bar with eight hustlers.
“That’s nothing,” said Truman. “Everybody we know does things like that these days, including some of your best friends, Andy. Now I’ll tell you something really interesting. I have this friend who’s having an affair with a father and a son. The father fucks him up the ass while he sucks the son’s cock. Now that’s fascinating.”
“Oh, really,” said Andy. It was the kind of “really” he usually reserved for weather reports.
“Is that all you can say, Andy?” said Truman. “ ‘Oh, really?’ I don’t know what’s wrong with you sometimes.”
“Oh, really,” said Andy again, even flatter.
Brigid asked Truman when he was going to get his next piece to Interview. “Well, I can’t give you the chapter from Answered Prayers I was going to give you,” he said, “because it’s two chapters now and I couldn’t get them both done in time, but one wouldn’t make sense without the other. You see? And I’m so busy anyway, because I’m doing one-hundred-seventy public appearances to promote Music for Chameleons—Random House says they never have had such a demand for interviews and TV appearances. And then every night in December I’m going to be reading from my work at Lincoln Center. It’s going to be a real theatrical experience and Lester Persky is producing it. And did I tell you that we’ve got Hal Ashby to direct “Hand-Carved Coffins”? Steve McQueen wants the lead, but I don’t want Steve McQueen. Heh-heh-heh.”
Andy said he liked Steve McQueen.
Truman said there was one thing he could do for Interview before he rushed off on his massive publicity tour: Let Brigid interview him. “Oh, and I almost forgot the presents I have for the three of you,” he said, reaching under the table into a paper bag. “This is the limited edition of Music for Chameleons and we only published fifty for my closest friends.” He handed each of us what appeared to be the regular edition stuck in beige cardboard slipcases that could have been glued together by Truman himself. Inside Andy’s he had written, “Andy! Affection! Admiration!” Brigid’s inscription was “Without whom etc.” and mine, “Bob, you rascal.”
Andy could barely contain his disdain, but I was touched. “Well, one of these days I have to write a book of my own,” I said. “You should,” said Truman, adding the line he had been feeding me for the past three years, “and I’m going to show you how to do it.” And then I finally received the long-awaited advice from my literary mentor: “You should have lots of pictures.”
“Gee, Bob,” said Andy, on the way downtown. “I thought Truman always said you were a great writer.” He held his “special edition” up for closer inspection. “Who does he think he’s trying to kid?” he said. “He’s just a big phony, right?”
There was no mention of Interview in Truman’s preface to Music for Chameleons; nor did Truman call from his book tour with a daily report of how much publicity he was getting us. In fact, he seemed to have completely forgotten that the bulk of what turned out to be his last book was published first in our magazine. Andy, however, never forgot how much money Lester Persky had paid for “Hand-Carved Coffins,” which was never made into a film, and he was even more perturbed when Persky also bought the rights to “A Day’s Work” for another handsome sum. “Shouldn’t we be getting part of that?” he asked, more than once.
I last saw Truman in Los Angeles in 1982. He was with Lester Persky and we met at the El Padrino Bar in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He was already soused when I arrived, at about four in the afternoon, and berated me bitterly for going to a dinner at Betsy Bloomingdale’s with Jerry Zipkin. When he died two years later, I went to his memorial at Town Hall in New York. Aside from C.Z. Guest, Lynn Wyatt, and Jan Cushing, the social set was conspicuously absent. So was Andy.